The Direct to Video Connoisseur

I'm a huge fan of action, horror, sci-fi, and comedy, especially of the Direct to Video variety. In this blog I review some of my favorites and not so favorites, and encourage people to comment and add to the discussion. If you click on an image, it will take you to that post's image page, which includes many more pics from the film and other goodies I couldn't fit in the actual review. For announcements and updates, don't forget to Follow us on Twitter and Like our Facebook page. If you're the director, producer, distributor, etc. of a low-budget feature length film and you'd like to send me a copy to review, you can contact me at dtvconnoisseur[at]yahoo.com. I'd love to check out what you got.

Announcement

Announcement

Hi everyone, it's been a while since I checked the page, and I wanted to make a few announcements.

First and foremost, it appears a dubious site has claimed the old url, meaning any link in any review that goes to the old mattmovieguy url is corrupt. I'm in the process of trying to remove them all, but it's a lot! It's best not to click on any link without hovering over it first to make sure it doesn't have mattmovieguy in the url.

Second, it appears since my last trip to the blog, Photobucket has decided to charge for third party hosting, meaning none of my images are appearing anymore. That's simply an aesthetic issue, but still annoying.

Thank you all for your patience, and again, hopefully this will all be fixed soon.

--Matt

Wednesday, October 30, 2013

I've seen this one on Instant for some time, and it looks like it could be a lot of fun. Plus it lists Robert Englund in the cast, which is another selling point. On the other hand, I had similar expectations for Zombie Strippers!, and was somewhat disappointed with that one, so who knows. That one also had Englund. Am I sensing a theme here?

Strippers vs Werewolves is about a London strip joint where Justice, giving Martin Kemp of Spandau Ballet a private dance, turns him on so much he turns into a werewolf and she stabs him in the eye with a silver fountain pen, killing him. That's not a good thing, when his werewolf friends want revenge, and it'll only be a matter of time before they trace his death back to the club. That leaves club owner, Sarah Douglas, with a choice (and no it's not to jump in a flying parallelogram and escape into space): fight or run. She chooses to fight, resulting in the ultimate showdown between strippers and werewolves.

You ever heard that joke "how many people with ADD does it take to change a light bulb? Let's ride a bike!" That's how I felt watching this movie. My God, it was all over the place, it never knew what it wanted to do. Not to mention, it did this comic book editing/cinematographic device where the screen would be split into panels and make things even worse. I don't remember that device working in Ang Lee's Hulk either. The worst was how it would look like it wanted to develop something, and then just totally abandon it. Whether it was Martin Compston's character torn between protecting Justice, his fiancee, or siding with his fellow werewolves, which runs through the film only to have him decide on his werewolves in a way that made it seem like he was never torn; or the strippers vs. zombie scorecard during the end battle, which is inexplicably abandoned after two minutes, and really never even kept score considering the strippers who were killed weren't actually killed. I understand, a movie called Strippers vs Werewolves should be all over the place, but considering most of the jokes were of the "waka waka waka" notsomuch variety, and the gore mixed with the bad jokes felt off in terms of dark humor, the inconsistent story had me thinking "what am I doing here?"

Why is a movie like Strippers vs Werewolves so hard to make right then? It sounds like it should make itself? When I tell people about the Direct to Video Connoisseur, it's movies like this they think of, and movies like this they assume I'd love, and I assume it too. I think it's that problem though, it feels like it should make itself, and then the film makers start going off the rails, whether it's a story that doesn't know where it wants to be, jokes that are just "hey-oh! Irony! waka waka waka!", or this Michael Bay split second take combined with comic book frames all over the screen style of editing. Simpler is often better. Maybe because I grew up on the coast of Maine, where simplicity is desired, where a lobster is simply boiled alive, cracked open, dipped in butter, and that's it, I have trouble with too much being done to jazz up something that should be so good on its own. This story of Martin Compston and Adele Silva's Justice should be enough to carry the day if he throws in his lot with her to protect her, and in the late 80s early 90s, it would have been, and all of this craziness would've been dialed down.

Don't get me wrong, there were some great touches in this that worked really well. The opening credits had "Hungry Like the Wolf" playing, which was really cool. At the end, when the strippers confront the werewolves at the end, they dress as Little Red Riding Hood, which I liked and was really hot. I liked the idea of the strippers fortifying their club for the showdown with the werewolves, but like a lot of the film, it felt like the build up was better than the payoff. And the actors, which I will get into more in the next paragraph, all turned in great performances and seemed to be on board with what the film was all about, even if the film didn't seem to know.

All right, so let's start with Martin Compston, who we've seen before in The Disappearance of Alice Creed. If you look at his imdb photo, he seems so happy to see you, doesn't he? Man, he was perfect for the guy who doesn't feel comfortable being a werewolf, and wants to protect his girlfriend, but doesn't know if he wants to cross Billy Murry, the werewolf leader. It's too bad we never got there with that. Billy Murray we've also seen before in One in the Chamber, and he was perfect as the baddie. Sarah Douglas was equally great as the strip club owner, but her death was pretty weird and muddled, something I was disappointed in. Even worse was Alan Ford, Brick Top in Snatch, who was fantastic, and is rubbed out by the werewolves without a fight. What a waste considering they somewhat developed his character. Finally, of all the strippers, I really liked Barbara Nedeljakova's (the two Hostel movies) character, though I think if they'd gotten rid of her awkward vampire hunter boyfriend character and made her the expert on the occult, it would've been so much better; and Adele Silva as Justice was good too, but would've been better had her character along with Compston's not been at odds with each other. Oh, and I almost forgot Martin Kemp and Robert Englund. That's because they're barely in the film.

I'm writing this review as my Celtics start their first season since 1998 without my favorite player, Paul Pierce, and of all the places to see someone in a Celtics Pierce jersey, it's here in a campy horror film shot in England. Yes, I'm also watching my Red Sox play in Game 6 of the World Series tonight too, and hopefully they'll win it, but still, I'm in for a long year with my C's, and seeing that jersey didn't help. On the other hand, I guess it's cool that those jerseys are sold there.

Okay, enough of that, let's wrap this up. It didn't work for me. You might dig it though. Too all over the place, too many things started but not finished, too hard to concentrate on anything. As of this posting, you can get it on Instant. Maybe check it out, at least you don't have to finish it if you don't like it like I did to write this review.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

This is one I've been meaning to do for a long time now, and even with it's availability on Netflix Instant for almost as long, I still haven't managed to make it happen. Well, now we're finally rectifying that and getting after it. One of our friends who already got after it is the great Exploding Helicopter, written though by guest reviewer and other friend of the site, Ninja Dixon. You can go there to see what they thought, and read further to see what we thought.

DNA has DTVC favorite Mark Dacascos as a doctor in a small hospital in Indonesia who is approached by Jurgen Prochnow to further his work on an experimental serum that boosts the human immune system. The problem is, he's trusting Jürgen Prochnow, and that proves costly as Prochnow double crosses him and uses the serum to resurrect this alien killing machine that looks exceedingly derivative. Now Dacascos, with the help of a beautiful CIA agent (Robin McKee), is looking to take Prochnow down and stop this beast.

While this is a DTV flick, it looks so much like it could have been widely released theatrical flop from the same time period, between the special effects and the canned dramatic wannabe John Williams orchestral music. In that sense it's cool to see Dacascos in a film like that, but beyond that, what are we doing here? Who knows why it wasn't a theatrical picture, but one guess is how derivative it is. How many times have we seen this before? And while we see it so much still on SyFy, at least those ones are bringing a camp element that this doesn't. All time special effects great William Mesa directs this, so he gives the film a competence that on some levels works against it, because the story is such well-worn territory that it's crying out for camp. At the same time, this is still 1998, so even his great special effects look dated at times, not to mention he probably didn't have the budget here to do what he could in some of the pictures he's known for. The film's one exploding helicopter comes to mind as an area where his visual effects missed in a hilariously bad way, probably due to that lack of budget, and it stands out as a fun schlock moment, one that unfortunately wasn't indicative of the film as a whole. Overall, while this isn't horrible, it's too unremarkable for a recommendation.

Mark Dacascos is a solid lead as always. Don't know if I liked the hairdo after the beginning, but beyond that he's good. I'm not sure why he didn't get more bigger roles, but I wonder if it was a film like this being relegated to DTV in the late 90s that held him back. I wonder too if he lacks a certain on-screen charisma, which isn't as evident in his films where he's allowed to showcase his superior martial arts skills, but in a film like this rears its ugly head and holds him back in the lead. I don't know. One thing that would be really cool is if he can get a spot in the next Expendables film. I know for guys like Scott Adkins and Gary Daniels, seeing them opposite more of the heavy hitters did a lot to showcase them to newer audiences, and I think that would be key for Dacascos as well.

Okay, do we want to do Jürgen Prochnow, or Proch-later-- Hey-oh! The thing I don't get is, how does Dacascos not know what Prochnow brings to the table? He's one of the ultimate baddies, of course he's going to double cross you and try to kill you-- Cenk Uygur voice: "of cooooourse!" He is one of those ready-made baddies though, where you can just take him out of the package and insert him into your film and you're good to go. I don't know what this one was trying to do by passing him off as a potential good guy for the first ten minutes, they weren't fooling anyone, but hey, good of you to try though. Here's to you Jürgen Prochnow, you're one of the good ones.

Robin McKee as the CIA agent helping out Dacascos was so 1998. She doesn't have a lot of other roles on her CV, and most of the ones she does have are small ones, but here she is 1998-ing it up. Between the hair, the outfits, the make-up, it was all like "just give me the Friends look", and I gotta say, I loved that time. It's an interesting fashion period, because the kids today miss it in favor of the more notable early 90s fashions, not the way guys getting their tips frosted has been embraced by them, even if they lump it in with early 90s Chess King style, as if the 90s existed as a monolith (sorry if I sound bitter about twentysomethings butchering my decade...!). The only places I ever see the 1998 aesthetic exist today outside of movies like this are in tributes to Friends or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it is there that it will survive and exist for posterity.

What travesty did this film commit that truly sunk it for me? No, not the fact that it's story was derivative, it was the addition of the kid. Argh! Why do movies do this to us? And this isn't an indictment of the kid playing the part, it's an indictment of the actual plot device in toto. Kids in action movies are annoying. Period, end of story. And this film makes it worse by committing the classic two wrongs don't make it right, by killing the kid off later on. You can't do that. The only thing worse than kids in action movies is killing kids off in action movies, so you can't fix the mistake of including him by having his death scene near the end. All sauteed in wrong sauce.

Okay, let's wrap this up. Beyond being there for a Dacascos completist or exploding helicopter connoisseurs, or maybe even Philippine movie connoisseurs-- check out the great Jim Gaines with a cameo up there!--, but it's a pass for me. Even the nice run time and availability on Instant can't save it for me. While it's not bad, it's not all that good either, and the fact that it's that unremarkable kills it in a sea of other options for you.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Back in 2010, our friend Simon at Explosive Action sent us five films that he ripped from his Japanese VHS copies. They were: Deadly Prey, Robowar, Strike Commando, Strike Commando II, and this flick. Somehow though, this one was lost in the shuffle, and we're only just getting to it now, more than two years after the most recent one we've done of them, Strike Commando II. I guess better late than never, right? Also, our friends Ty at Comeuppance Reviews, Fred at Ninja Dixon, and Jason at robotGEEK have all hit this one too, so you can go to their sites to see what they thought.

Hands of Steel has Daniel Greene as Paco Queruak (I'm not kidding about that name), a cyborg with no memory of his past who is programmed to kill a charismatic leader and environmentalist who threatens the evil John Saxon's corporation. When he has memories of his past he doesn't fulfill his job, and runs back to his home state of Arizona, where he finds love, takes on a bunch of truckers, and beats the tri-state arm wrestling champ. But hot on his heels are Saxon and his men, looking to take him out before the FBI finds him. Will they succeed?

This is a Sergio Martino joint, and as such, you know what you're in for: a straight up Italian no-budget schlock fest, and that's what you get. It might have a bit of a slow start, but once it kicks in, it's equal parts hilarious and bad action, everything you'd want when you fire something like this up. The sets, the futuristic props, the Daniel Greene, the John Saxon, it's all there. Some of my favorite moments included when the old guy who owns the junk yard is offed by a baddie, and the "Indian Style" arm wrestling match, which is simply the usual arm wrestling match, only with rattlesnakes posted on either side of the table. Oh, and then there's the too sweet laser at the end. This is as fun a time as you think it would be.

Daniel Greene as the hero looks like the kind of guy you'd see playing a guest role on Murder, She Wrote or something in the 80s, maybe rocking a sweater over a button-up shirt, or if he's playing the young boyfriend/doughnut salesboy maybe some more revealing clothing. Not necessarily the heel, but if you needed him to be he could do that too. Somehow he found himself here as the lead, and while his torso screams it, his face, hair, and demeanor screams a bridge too far. Yet that's what makes it so fun, and when he's paired up with a great heel like Italian D-flick mainstay George Eastman, he's fine, so it all works. As an aside, I see that he had a part in Arthur 2: On the Rocks. I totally forgot that sequel happened.

John Saxon is back and he's great. How he ended up in this, I have no idea, and he's not in it much, but he's great as the head baddie. His final showdown with Greene and the big laser is the tops. The thing is, he's just so cool, whether it's Enter the Dragon or Mitchell or this, he's just so much fun to watch, and he's a great addition to any film. When we start to really see him, and he's in a helicopter shooting down at out hero, it's such a great moment, I almost wanted to see him succeed, he's that awesome. Here's to you John Saxon, you're one of the good ones. Also, according to imdb, he only shot his scenes in Italy, because this wasn't a SAG film, and as such refused to do any of the shots in the US. He credits that with saving his life, because there was a helicopter crash during shooting in Arizona that claimed the life of co-star Claudio Cassinelli, and he would've been on that helicopter too. He hasn't done a non-SAG film since.

All right, so we mentioned Greene, Saxon, and the late Cassinelli, who played a hit man hired by Saxon to track down Greene. We also had Janet Agren as Linda, the woman who ran the arm wrestling joint/cheap motel Greene goes to while he's on the run. She made a great living as a D-movie actress in Italy until 1991, when she gave it all up. Who could give up all of that? We also mentioned George Eastman above. He plays Raul, the heel and bad trucker who tries to kill Greene on multiple occasions. I think the only other flick of his we've done is 1990: Bronx Warriors. There was also a guy working for Saxon who looked like JC's buddy from Sidehackers. He always had these shades on and looked ready to tell Saxon "right-on daddy-o". It's touches like that that make films like this a lot of fun.

I've mentioned this before when talking about the great Bruno Mattei, but I feel it's worth bringing up again while discussing Sergio Martino. As bad as these films are, these directors come from a certain pedigree that gives these movies a certain, I don't know, watchability, because, as bad as they are, they're shot and planned out with a certain amount of craftsmanship. This is the difference between these flicks and their modern counterpart where stuntmen and other non-directors are helmed to directed them. It's not just these Italian directors too, Albert Pyun, Fred Olen Ray, Isaac Florentine, they all direct and give us something we can sit down and watch. Cameras aren't all over the place, they aren't afraid to give us a still frame, or lock into a good shot. We took this kind of thing for granted in the 80s and 90s, and now I can't watch a modern action flick without getting a headache.

Okay, time to get off the soap box. You can actually get this on DVD-R from Amazon, so it's not as hard to get as it used to be. You can also do used VHS, both foreign and domestic. It's a lot of fun and worth checking out in any case. Thank you again to Simon at Explosive Action for hooking us up with this.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

This one has been on Instant for a long time now, and I've been meaning to get to it. The cast list is prodigious to say the least: Christian Slater, Ving Rhames, Colm Meany (we always want to do films with Star Trek: The Next Generation cast members), Sean Bean, Dominic Monaghan, and James Cromwell. How could I possibly ignore that? And how could that possibly be bad? Well, we'll see. Also, our buddy Mitch at The Video Vacuum hit this one too, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Soldiers of Fortune stars Slater as a special forces guy who's dishonorably discharged after he punches a CIA agent (Colm Meany) in Afghanistan that's about to kill a member of his unit. Poor and in need of cash, a woman comes to him with a proposition: take four billionaires into battle, bring them home alive, and the money they get will be enough for him to fix his problems and enough for her and her brother to fund the resistance to liberate the small Black Sea Island she's from from the evil regime that's terrorizing it. And it just so happens that that regime's security head is none other than Meany, Slater's old nemesis. Sounds like two birds with one stone if you ask me.

This one is pretty rough. To start with, we have this construct of training billionaires to fight that bogs the story down immediately. It's an interesting idea in theory, but in practice it's a series of bad montages with off-beat music and bad comedic asides. From there nothing else is ever developed. The baddies aren't developed, Slater isn't developed, the woman who recruits him isn't developed; all we get are these billionaires, who are not people we really want to know that well anyway, and because there are so many of them, we never get to see any of them developed well either. The problem with that is, we wonder why we're here, what the point is. If it's for the action, what we get is not all that compelling beyond a few moments here and there. For instance, when the rebel villages is raided by Meany and his men, it's supposed to be tense and action-packed, but instead we see the woman who recruited Slater running around ducking her head like we're watching a behind the scenes featurette-- it was that unconvincing. Between the plot that was a mess, and the action that was hit or miss, Soldiers of Fortune is a skip for me.

I don't know what we're doing with Christian Slater here either, because he was really good, but his character was so sauteed in wrong sauce it wasn't funny. He's playing a special forces guy that saw real action in Afghanistan trying to show these rich boys that it's not really a game out there. The thing is though, he's doing the same thing in a real life way by acting in the movie! I like the potential message to the consumer of films like this: that what you see isn't what the real thing is, and you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking seeing a bunch of action films makes you a soldier; but by having Slater be the messenger you cut his legs out from under him as a character, plus, the movie itself isn't realistic either, it's still a movie! I can't blame Slater for that though, he did his best with the role. As far as I can tell, as an actor, he hasn't had a DTV dud performance, even if some of the films like this one have been.

Here we have Sarah Ann Schultz being held by the woman who recruited Slater (if you see her real name on imdb you'll understand why I don't use it here), and I wanted to use this moment to talk about how this was indicative of a much bigger problem in the film. Schultz's character was the daughter of the colonel who runs the island, and she's introduced to us as a psychotic femme fatale, and the one real weakness of the colonel, as you can get to him through her. So we get that introduction that they go out of their way to give us at the beginning instead of getting on with the action, yet they only use it for a quick moment at a plot point near the end. Why bother if that's all you're going to do? And this was the whole film, things introduced and never fleshed out, so it's like our time is wasted constantly. The thing is, this could've been a great underpinning for a better plot: kidnap Schultz earlier, create more tension, delve deeper into the characters, and then if the action scenes are still lackluster, at least they have more purpose; and if you're not going to go in that direction, forget these big introductions that lead us to believe you will.

All right, let's try to go through this cast. Ving Rhames plays an African arms dealer, complete with a bad accent. Why make Ving Rhames into a goofball? He can't do it, he's too bad ass for us to believe it. Sauteed in wrong sauce. Colm Meany would've been a great baddie, had he been developed. He was great at the beginning, but he only has a few other scenes. Again, why are you giving him to us as this awesome baddie if you're not going to use him? Sean Bean played a metal magnate or something. He's Sean Bean if you're wondering. Dominic Monaghan played a video game designer who creates really violent video games. For some reason his character has a broken leg, but it was one of those "plot convenience theater broken legs", meaning it's broken when the plot needs it to be, and not when it's more expedient. James Cromwell plays a cell phone mogul. I think he's supposed to be the new fangled version of the Texas oil man, but, as much as he tried, it wasn't written well enough to come off. Finally, imdb says DTVC favorite Tim Abell is in this, but I didn't really see him. There's one scene that's an ad for the rich people go to war camp that Slater is recruited to work for, and I thought he could have been in there, but if that's so, it's a tiny non-speaking part. On the one hand I think it might have been for the best because this wasn't the best movie, but on the other, it would've been cool to see him in this, and cool to see him act opposite all of these great names.

Finally, I noticed this great blue bird in one of the establishing shots. When a film is the kind of slog this one was, an avian buddy like this can be a welcomed sight. I wish we had more birds in the film, because we really needed them. Just a big ol' bird sanctuary for 20 minutes of film would've been great.

Okay, I have no idea what's happening here, so I might as well wrap this up. Even with the cast, even with the quick runtime, even with the availability on Netflix, this is a skip for me. It was like a bad City Slickers paradigm, or worse, Soldier Boyz, and between the lackluster action and the bogged down plot, I was looking for all the avian friends I could find for support. Unfortunately they were few. (I believe I've officially lost my mind.)

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

I went through my archives and found that it's been over four years since I last reviewed a Howling flick, that one being the one that preceded this one, Howling IV. We've also done Howling III and the amazing Howling II if you'd like to see what we thought of those ones too. Anyway, this one was added on Instant recently, so I figured, why not make our way through some more of the series.

Howling V takes place in Budapest, where a group of Americans and Brits are taken to a castle out in the country that's been locked up for five hundred years. They're the first to see it since then, the only problem is they may not make it home alive to tell their friends and family about it, as someone or something is bumping them off one by one. Who could be doing this? Why? And will they find out in time?

Let's try to understand this: we're talking about a werewolf flick as a who-dun-it mystery movie? Which guest is the werewolf? Col. Mustard Seed? I'm not kidding, and as you can imagine, in the framework of a late 80s low-budget horror flick, it's as boring as all get out. We don't even really get a good look at the werewolf. Occasionally he takes someone out like a monster in a Three Stooges episode, or he bursts through a wall or a snow bank like the Kool-Aid man-- and if you're wondering, I did shout out "Oh Yeah!" each time he did that--, but for a werewolf film it's pretty scant. Maybe with a big crew of veteran riffers you could tackle this on a bad movie night, especially with the Instant availability, but otherwise I'd skip it.

I understand that the werewolf film is tough to shake up, tough to find new ways to attack, but the problem with the way they went about this was that they didn't set it up right away as a murder mystery. Why not cut to the chase and tell us the moment everyone gets into the castle what you're doing? "One of you is a werewolf, and we're going to figure out who it is and kill him or her." Boom, now we're rolling. It wasn't just that this was a werewolf murder mystery, but the execution of the murder mystery was off. Perhaps with better execution we might have had something new, something better than "what am I going to do when the full moon comes? Someone help me!" Of course we always have Howling II for a clinic on how to make the werewolf flick.

This guy above us had some potential as a real heel character, and he just seemed really awesome, but he, like everyone else, was never fully developed. Still, he worked as just being cool, and sometimes in these bad DTV horror flicks, just being cool is enough. We don't have enough of that kind of guy in modern films do we? The hair, the dark suit, the power tie, the smooth, sophisticated, condescending voice. He's in it for himself, can be a jerk, but we have to admit if he offered for us to join him for a beer, we'd be flattered and stoked. Here's to you this guy, you were one of the good ones.

The guy whose pic I posted first is Phillip Davis, and I recognize him from a Woody Allen film, Cassandra's Dream. He's been in plenty of other stuff too, but that's what I knew. In that one he didn't have anywhere near as big a part as he did here, but I imagine he's more likely to put the Allen flick on his CV than Howling V. I will say, I enjoyed Cassandra's Dream, but I would've enjoyed it much more had it been a werewolf film. As far as I know, out of all of Woody Allen's flicks, he's yet to go werewolf. That's too bad, but maybe on his next one he will. "I... I... I just don't know why I'm so hairy all of a sudden... my God, next I'll have fleas... this is horrible..."

I'm thinking as far as the being born lottery goes, 1489 Budapest had to be a tough one. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of people not enjoying 2013, and maybe some who live in Budapest too, but on a bell curve, 1489 Budapest is probably huddled around a "man, this sucks" mean. Maybe Budapest 1389 would've been worse? Or maybe when the Ottomans took it over in the early 16th century that would've been worse (Wikipedia)? Christ, considering that they made this movie there in 1989, maybe that was the worst time. "Howling V being made here was a bigger tragedy than the Ottoman invasion!"

Okay, this is on Instant, and maybe for a werewolf film that you and your buddies can make fun of this is a decent pick, but I certainly wouldn't attack it alone, and I wouldn't attack it with amateur riffers. It's boring, which is a death knell for any film, but especially bad for a late 80s low-budget horror flick.

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Bob Wagstaff, co-writer of Pushin' Up Daisies, asked me if I would review his film. It looked like a pretty fun deal, so I figured I'd give it a shot. I got to watch it on the copy they uploaded to Vimeo, which was pleasantly free of any obtrusive "For Promotional Use Only" splashed across the screen, so thank you guys for that. Now, let's see how the film went.

Pushin' Up Daisies follows Darren and his buddy as they drive across country from LA to Darren's hometown in rural Georgia to make a documentary on Darren's brother Rusty's work as a flower delivery guy. We see the film through Darren's friend, who's making a documentary of the making of Darren's documentary. Things don't go as planned though as a zombie outbreak disrupts the proceedings, but Darren is undeterred and carries on, hoping to see his film making vision through. Will he survive long enough to make it happen though?

I really liked the idea of this film, and the long takes were really fantastic and captured a great comedic take on the documentary and overly indulgent young film makers; but with all of these found footage/the documentary is all we have to go on type films, the cinematography eventually becomes tedious. It's like with the old horror films when they used to hand out a barf bag to people going to see them in the theater, I could use one from all the nauseating herky jerky camerawork. I get that that's supposed to add a level of verisimilitude, but I'm watching a zombie flick, I can ignore the use of a tripod every once in a while for the sake of my sanity. What I really loved though was the idea that the scariest thing in the zombie apocalypse isn't the zombies, but rather the ignorant rednecks with guns using it as a license to shoot anything that staggers. There were a lot of comedic elements like that that worked really well, and maybe you won't be as put off by the constantly moving camera as I was; in either case, I think this is worth checking out.

We've seen our share of the found footage/the raw documentary footage is all we have type of film here, whether it's a low-budget submission like this, or a DTV horror flick trying to save money and come off avant-garde at the same time. I'm not saying I need Darren and Rusty to be sitting on the floor and talking to zombies as if it were an Ozu flick, it's just that the novelty wears off and I find I'm getting a headache. After the third time the cameraman runs after something and all I see is what looks like the bumper from the old Batman without the Bat-logo to focus on, I needed to take a break. Call me old fashioned, but there's something to be said for the traditional omnipotent eye, with mounted cameras and scenes cut together.

I did appreciate the success the actors had in delivering the long takes. Again, you wouldn't need long takes if the documentary film is all we have construct was taken out, but still, that shouldn't take anything away from the actors who pulled that off, or the crew who seamlessly incorporated things like car crashes into these long takes. The director asked a lot of them for the sake of his documentary feel, and they all came through in a way that you might not even notice if you weren't looking for it. It's nice to see that kind of high level in a film with limited means like this, and it's the kind of inspired work that makes me really enjoy reviewing people's screeners here at the DTVC.

Their take on the zombie apocalypse was great too. The idea that they're pretty innocuous, but it's the Georgia rednecks you need to worry about, was hilarious, and is probably the way the rest of the world would envision the zombie apocalypse going here in 'Murica. I mean, I don't live too far from rural Maine and New Hampshire, and I could see the same thing happening here, it would be an excuse for all the gun nuts to shoot anything that staggers. When I'm watching a lot of zombie flicks, or a lot of found footage, etc. flicks, I'm looking for something new that they bring to the table, and this was definitely it, and it was really funny.

There was one addition to the story that didn't work for me though, and that was the lynch mob who attacks Darren's friend (I can't remember his character name, and of course most of the cast doesn't have a picture on imdb, so I can't look him up), who's African American. I don't know what that was doing in the film, but I don't find lynch mobs all that funny. Then when we see the character next, we find out he killed the lynch mob, but due to that whole the documentary footage is all we have construct, we don't get the satisfaction of seeing it, or even know if he really did what he said he did, because he left the camera behind with Darren and ran when the lynch mob first approached. And even his explanation of how he killed the lynch mob wasn't all that funny. I don't know, it was an odd left turn to take the film on, but maybe as a dude from the Northeast I just don't get that kind of thing.

This is available to stream or download from Amazon. It's definitely a unique film that had some really great and inspired moments. You've seen the cinematic construct of the all we've got is the documentary footage before, but this does make an earnest attempt to add something new to it, and while the documentary style camera work feels like well-worn territory, the story doesn't, and that alone might make it worth a look. I thank Bob Wagstaff again for letting me have a look at his film.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

I've had this in my Instant queue for sometime now, and last week I noticed our buddy Moe Porne on my Twitter feed talking about it. I asked him to give me his thoughts when he was done, thinking I might review it, and he told me I'd get a kick out of it, so here we are. As an aside, you can catch Moe on his Drunk on VHS podcast hosted by Couch Cutter, a fine site I used to write for from time to time.

Axe Giant takes place in the Minnesota wilderness, where a boot camp operator takes some troubled teens to rehabilitate them in lieu of a stint in the pen. Things go from bad to worse though when one of the little brats rips a horn off an ox skull lying on the ground. Turns out that skull belongs to Babe the Blue Ox, and Paul Bunyan is an enormous twisted man-child with a penchant for murdering people who desecrate Babe's burial ground. Now everyone is in for it.

This one was pretty fun, but its ending was all over the place, which betrayed the proceedings. There was one thing I had a real issue with that I'll get into in my last paragraph because it contains spoilers. It was definitely a low-budget schlockfest that worked both as a time killer and a good bad movie night option until that ending, when it kinda wasn't as much fun anymore. It definitely had those great low-budget touches though, like I loved that they just took a National Forest ranger office or something, slapped new words over the sign, and passed it off as a juvenile detention center. And Joe Estevez combined with a scant Dan Haggerty added more laughs. Paul Bunyan himself was a great baddie, and the idea of making him a horror villain was fun too. As someone who used to watch Maury, I also appreciated the way they made fun of the drill sergeant in the boot camp episodes. It had a lot of elements like that that worked, and I think even with the bad ending, it might be fun enough to get you to the church on time. On the other hand, it's not very remarkable, and with all there is to chose from on Instant, maybe not worth it.

Joe Estevez played the crazy local, and I couldn't figure out what to do with him, but the fact that he was Joe Estevez was enough I guess. He was playing the stereotypical Southern backwoods crazy, even though he was supposed to be from Minnesota. It's hard to tell if he was just overacting because he's a D-movie actor, or he was doing a spoof on that character from most horror films. That's the problem with a lot of modern low-budget horror flicks, they try to have this meta-spoof quality to them that insulates them from criticism, because they can say "oh, we were making fun of that kind of thing, we weren't actually doing it." The Asylum seems to have made a cottage industry out of that, but theirs often work better. On the other hand, if you don't trust that Estevez was spoofing old horror flicks, and think he was overacting, you can at least make fun of him.

The Maury boot camp episode has always been the biggest crock to me, and this film really got that right-- which is a reason why I'm inclined to give them a pass on Estevez's character. I've always seen it as these moron drill sergeants who suffer from a form of Little Man's Syndrome and get off by yelling at defenseless kids. I remember one when a girl on the show, after being berated by the audience and the drill sergeant while her mom played the innocent victim, said "but my mom is doing drugs with her boyfriend all the time", and the drill sergeant yelled at her "this is about you, not her!" No, really it's about you being a mental midget Mr. Drill Sergeant, and this movie nailed that with their own drill sergeant, played by Boston's own Thomas Downey. He was a total jerk to the kids and the counselor, played by Kristina Kopf, who was sent to help the kids. I kind of wished he'd done it even more, been like the real morons you'd see on Maury, but I guess this was good enough.

If you've been rockin' with me for sometime, you may know I enjoy hiking, and not just any hiking, I like to go up good-sized mountains, hit some steep sections, and really give myself a kick in the pants. But I'm in good shape, and I enjoy it. That's why it was funny to see the drill sergeant take the kids on a hike for punishment, and I had to realize that for most Americans, that would be a punishment. Like the hike I just went on yesterday in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I had a great time, but it had some long steep sections that would not be a lot of people's idea of fun. I guess one person's past time is another's punishment.

SPOILER ALERT!!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!!
As I mentioned above, the end of the film was all over the place, and it started with Paul Bunyan killing one of the kids, Rosa, played by Victoria Ramos. She's developed as an honorable and just character, who has a young daughter that she wants to regain custody of once she's out of the pen. The kind of character we want to root for, or at the very least, don't want to see die because she has a young daughter. Of course the film then decides to off her. Really? How mean-spirited can you get? That's just bad form, and ruined an otherwise fun horror flick. From there it gets worse, when her friend Marty, played by Cliff Williams, is killed by Joe Estevez in a fit of craziness as Estevez tries to stop everyone else from killing Paul Bunyan. It was just weird and an out of place way to knock off another character. It just seemed like the film couldn't figure out how to end things, and the ending is the most important part.
END SPOILER!!!! END SPOILER!!!! END SPOILER!!!!

So that's it, and we didn't even get into Martin Kove's son Jesse, who plays one of the kids, or Dan Haggerty as a Grizzly Adams type who runs a logging operation up there in the late 19th century. It's all kind of hit or miss I guess, and while this has its moments, the ending ultimately kills it for me, but you might not have as much trouble with it. At least it's on Instant, so it's not much of an investment.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

A friend of mine hooked me up with a copy of his VHS of this flick. The names Frank Zagarino and Matthias Hues were all I needed to hear to give it a look. At the very least it might be so bad it's good, right?

The Protector is about a dude with amnesia, played by Steven Nijjar, who is being chased by all kinds of people, like Matthias Hues and Frank Zagarino and the NSA. He has a disc, or knows where a disc might be, with a virus on it that could have a massive impact on the world economy. Now Nijjar needs to stay alive, find out who he can trust, oh, and I forgot to mention, someone kidnapped his son. Will he make it happen?

We use the term "so bad it's good" so often when dealing with these kinds of movies, but what about "so awesome it's good"?, because, while this is pretty bad, it's pretty awesomely bad. Right away, Nijjar is in a diner which is shot up by a bunch of women who look like a cross between a hit squad and back-up dancers in a Robert Palmer video. His feet catch on fire, he runs away-- into a body of water to extinguish the flames-- and the ladies start shooting at him with rocket launchers, which blow up the junkers at the car lot Nijjar runs through. How amazing is that? Even better, Nijjar's son's voice is dubbed over by a guy trying to sound like a kid. I'm not kidding. How much more amazing is that? Then you have some sweet fights, especially with Zagarino, and between Hues and Zagarino-- some that are choreographed at a higher level than we usually see for a film of this grade. Just a fun 90s DTV actioner.

Let's start with Zagarino. He had some really nice fights, which is what you really want from him in a film like this. He also had some great lines. I've noticed he's at his best as an actor when he's allowed to deliver sophisticated dialog in a monotone voice. When he yells at Nijjar "you're an asshole!", it sounds silly, but if he'd just said it calmly, it would've been perfect. It's a difficult thing for an actor to mitigate a rough screenplay and make it sound natural, and poor Zagarino is often forced to act in films with rough screenplays, meaning he's often caught out. That's okay if he's allowed to deliver on some good fights, and he has a couple nice ones here, especially a good strip club brawl. Not the most memorable of Zagarino's flicks, but not horrible either.

Matthias Hues is up to his old tricks as the film's baddie. I got the sense that most of his scenes were shot in a day, because he's not in many locations. You get a lot of him smoking a cigar, delivering bad dialog, and either shirtless or in a leopard-print silk shirt. Then at the end he gets after it with two fight scenes against Zagarino. Before those scenes, he runs around quite a bit firing a couple machine guns at people off-screen. You could tell that he's done that enough, because he posed in those shots with style. That's what you want from a baddie, loads of style. It would've been nice to see more fights with him though. Like Dolph, he's one of the best pure athletes we see here at the DTVC, especially for his size, and he makes the fights exciting because of that.

I had heard of Steven Nijjar before reviewing this film, but his parts in the other movies I'd done were small (those movies were TC 2000 and Expect No Mercy). This one he's in it quite a bit, and while he can't carry a movie the way Zagarino can as a hero or Hues can as the baddie, he's not bad. He doesn't have many credits to his name after this, so we'll see how many more times he makes it on the DTVC.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who hear a man speak in a high pitched voice trying to mimic the child that he's dubbing over and think "I need to go on imdb and kill this movie"; and people like me who laugh, text my girlfriend about it, and give the ol' Tiger Woods fist pump. With over 900 of these reviews in the can at this point, it's moments like this that keep me sane; but, also, it's moments like this that I started the DTVC for, and I love that over six years and 930-plus reviews later that I can still be surprised by something I haven't seen before.

This one is not an easy find. As of this posting, Amazon doesn't even have it. It's worth keeping an eye out for it though, because it's a fun time. Low-budget 90s bad action, a great way to kill 90 minutes. So awesome it's good.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

A couple weeks ago Jasmine Reid, producer of Profile of a Killer, came to me to see if I could review her film, and we're making it happen now. Also, our friend Vic at Vic's Movie Den hit this one, so you can go there to see what he thought. Now let's see what I thought.

Profile of a Killer is about a serial killer who's dumping bodies along US-61 in Minnesota. Saul (Gabriele Angieri), a well known FBI profiler from Florida, is called in to investigate, and before he knows it, the killer kidnaps him. The killer is a teenage boy (Joey Pollari), and he wants Saul to profile him. Now Saul is at the mercy of this child killer and needs to use all of his skills in dealing with serial killers to stay a live. Hot on their trail is Rachel (Emily Fradenburgh), a local detective, who takes over the case after Saul is kidnapped. Will they be able to stop this boy and his killing spree?

This definitely had its moments, and I wouldn't call it a bad film, but it was long-- like almost 2 hours-- and there really wasn't enough material here for something that long. I personally saw a great moment to wrap the film up around the 45-minute mark, and while I'm not saying there weren't moments after that that weren't great too, I just don't know how much I needed them. This easily could've been a solid two-part story arc on a show like Criminal Minds, maybe like an end of the season cliff-hanger, and in that capacity it would've mitigated another area that I had a problem with: poor character development. If this had been a two-part episode in an established crime drama, we already would've had characters we knew as a base from which to start this, and it could've hit the ground running. Instead, we had bits and pieces of character development, but it either felt grafted in, like Rachel's moment with her fellow detective, or came at a moment when we needed to move things a long quicker, like Rachel talking to the killer's parents near the end of the film. Again, this isn't horrible, and maybe even the length wouldn't kill you, so if you're a fan of shows like Criminal Minds this might be worth checking out if you see it at your RedBox kiosk or something.

Anyone who's been rockin' with me for a while knows that a film's length is a sticking point, and I'll tell you why. I think it was Roger Corman who said the perfect length is 88 minutes, because it fit on 11 reels and made it cheaper to pack than a 90-minute film; but for the sake of argument we'll go with 90 minutes as the optimum length. 90 minutes gets the viewer in and out without asking for too much of an investment, yet at the same time that's ample time to tell us what you need to tell us. Anything after 90 minutes is borrowed time, so the first 90 needs to be of such high quality that we don't realize we've been watching for that long, and as I mentioned above, the 45-minute mark looked like a great place to start wrapping things up, so by 90 we were already well onto borrowed time. Considering we already knew who the killer was, we'd seen him kill multiple people, now all we needed to do was get to Rachel finding him, so it was only a matter of time before we were spinning our wheels in place, with all the tension dried up. That was too bad, because there were some really great tense moments that got my heart rate up, which is what I want from a film like this, I just want them in a smaller package with less packing tape surrounding them.

Gabriele Angieri as Saul was great, and he affected that vibe of a Joe Mantegna in Criminal Minds or Anthony LaPaglia in Without a Trace, which made him a very compelling protagonist. Again though, this is the kind of story that you drop him into after the season's previous 12 episodes where we've seen him crack however many other cases, or maybe three or four other TV movies that established his character. I know the market is flooded with TV shows like that, which kind of puts this film and his character in a spot where we wonder "what are they bringing to the table? Why do I need Gabriele Angieri when I can have Joe Mantegna?" You know I don't know, I guess maybe because you've seen all the episodes of your favorite crime drama so much that you need something new but along the same lines, and in that sense, Angieri gives you that guy you're familiar with and you're looking for when you pick something like this up from RedBox.

I really liked the idea of the killer being a kid who grew up with no hardships and, as such, had no means of forming his identity. I used to be fascinated by the Sweet Sixteen show on MTV for the same reason, watching these young girls who have never wanted for anything searching for some sense of self and validation from the outside world. The problem though is that the character devolves into the bitter teen anon troll we see all over the Internet. I was waiting to see him show Saul his OK Cupid page where he complains about how he's always "friendzoned". While it's a cool idea in theory, and might work really well in that TV drama capacity I discussed above, it doesn't make for a very compelling villain, no matter how well Joey Pollari played him. And that's another area where the run time creeps in, because we're done with this kid's anon trolling manifesting itself in killing and indulgent conversations with Saul by the 45-minute mark, and we wish we could just block him and he'll go away.

SPOILER ALERT!!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!!
This character here was known only as "hooker", and she's the first victim killed by our villain while Saul is his captive. The scene when Saul wakes up and hears through the baby monitor in his room that the killer has her in his killing station is so chilling and tense, I felt like it made up for the previous 30 minutes where not much happens. The problem was, it let us off the hook. It comes and goes so fast, and then we're treated to a scene the next morning where the killer shows Saul her dead body. What a wasted opportunity. Take us into the room, and I'm not saying you need to be too macabre, but now that you've got us, really get us and leave us wondering what he's going to do to her-- and she wonders what he's going to do to her. Keep my heart racing, and use it as a means to really explore the killer's character organically. Maybe she says something that sets him off. Maybe she does something that causes him to hesitate. Why does he react the way he does? You can have a 2-hour movie as long as the right scenes are longer. I can think of another where Rachel is investigating a warehouse, and instead of giving us long takes that drive up the tension of the unknown, we get quick jumpcuts and before we know it the scene is over and no action happens. Contrast that with the scene at the end where Rachel meets the killer's parents. We're already over an hour into the film, we know that she's going to learn a key piece of information that will get her to Saul's location, this is no time to draw things out, yet here's where the film decides to do that. It was frustrating.
END SPOILER!!!! END SPOILER!!!! END SPOILER!!!!

So this is ultimately a pass for me, but I do think someone who likes the serial killer TV crime drama might enjoy this, even at the longer run time. As far as I can tell, Amazon VOD or on DVD from them is the only way to go, so if you're a fan of shows like Criminal Minds, a $4 Amazon VOD rental might not be the worst thing for you, though if it ever ends up on RedBox or Netflix Instant, that would be better.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

I saw this was on Instant, and it had Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames in it. That's it, oh, and it was 90 minutes long. That helps too. As an aside, did you know that Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames were born about seven months apart? Both in 1959, Rhames on May 12, Kilmer on December 31. imdb is a wonderful time waster, isn't it?

7 Below is about a house in which the family's adopted son kills them all in the early 1900s. When a group of people in the present time, including Val Kilm and Luke Goss, take a bus trip into the Minnesota wilderness, and the bus crashes, local man Ving Rhames takes them back to his place to wait out a storm. That place is, you guessed it, the house where the kid offed his family.

I know Val, it hurts. I don't know what we're doing here. Too much nothing happening. Too much almost happening but not happening. So many loose ends flying together near the end that I needed a pair of safety goggles. Maybe most egregious: our heroes do nothing to figure out their own plight or how they can fix it. They stumble around aimlessly in the dark, though we're supposed to believe they know what they're doing, but they never get close to what's happening to them, and need it revealed in the last 10 minutes. That's lazy in my book. There was an attempt to affect a Stephen King style secluded location creepiness, but the characters don't buy in, which means we lose it; and the Vincent Price haunted mansion style film falls flat too when, despite Rhames's best efforts, his Price-like character is written too flatly to keep us intrigued. By the time we see a ghost in a sheet attack the hero (I'm not kidding, it was almost bad Halloween costume ghost in the sheet), I was done. This is a pass for me.

Val honey, I know, what is your agent doing? How did you end up in this? Yes, if you close your eyes enough maybe it'll all be a dream and you'll be back playing Jim Morrison. His role in this isn't as big as you'd like, and while I'm giving some of the plot away, I think it's better to warn you going in that, while he's good, he barely makes it through the first third of the film. A surprising development? A plot twist keeping us on our toes? Or a Kilmer bait-and-switch? You decide. (Oh, and I will not make any jokes about how former Batman Kilmer looks primed to play the Penguin in the next film.) (Didn't you just say you weren't going to make that joke?)

I don't know if this movie was trying to be original or hit us with an original concept, but it was pretty paint-by-numbers, right down to the classic White Man Will Save You trope. Latina? White Man will save you. What reason do you have not to trust me? There is not 500 years of history telling you you're making a mistake, this is a movie, and White Man is good, very good. Yes, statistically speaking, if a woman is stranded on the side of the road with car trouble and a straight White Man pulls over to help her, things are more likely to end badly for her than good for her-- but not in Movieworld, where White Man is good and he will hug you and love and protect you from Bad Men. Save us White Man!

Ving Rhames does his best to pull what he can from his character. He tries to make it a cross between his own aesthetic and that old Vincent Price haunted mansion character, but there isn't much there for him to work with. Man it was fun watching him try though. Maybe that's why he took this role, for the challenge of pulling that off. If you really want to think outside the box though, have the blond-haired blue-eyed hero play the Vincent Price character, and Ving Rhames be the guy that picks up the hot Latina who's having car trouble. Now that's a plot twist for an American movie.

Among the other stars, we had Matt Barr as our hero, Bonnie Somerville as Kilmer's wife, and Rebecca Da Costa as the woman Barr picks up by the side of the road. They all do the roles you expect them to, though Somerville as Kilmer's wife was fun when she and Kilmer were arguing early on, and it was too bad she couldn't play off him more. Then there was Luke Goss and Barr's brother. We've seen him in a fair amount of DTV roles, and he seems to have carved out this niche for himself playing the early-thirtysomething all-American jackass. He has it all down, the mannerisms, the speech (though his accent does peak out from time to time) the boot-cut designer jeans with rips in all the right places, the gaudy belt buckle, the knit cap, and the four-button muscle-fit henley. The thing is, in real life he's a fortysomething man from London. I guess if his twin brother Matty can carve out a niche playing gigs at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, Luke can carve out a niche as the all-American jackass, and I think he being removed from it like he is, he can bring a sense of self-awareness to his rendition of the character that a real all-American jackass wouldn't have. In that sense, Goss may have been the most consistent character, in that like the others it was so one-dimensional, but he's going for that and nailed it.

Obviously this is a pass for me. My girlfriend told me that when she looked it up on Netflix after I told her I was reviewing it, that one of the reviewers on there asked for the ol' temporal refund-- you know, "I want my 90 minutes back." I never demand the temporal refund, because good or bad I get a review out of it, but you might, so I'd avoid it, because we all know no one has ever been made whole on that temporal refund in the history of movies.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

I saw that this was on Instant, was directed by schlock auteur Fred Olen Ray, and looked like a fun time, so I figured why not make it happen. Also, clocking in at 81 minutes doesn't hurt either. Let's see then if I made the right choice. Also, our friend Mitch at The Video Vacuum made this happen, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Bad Girls from Mars is about the making of a D film of the same name that has been beset by tragedy after tragedy. It seems its leading ladies can't stop getting themselves murdered. This isn't the worst thing for the film's producers, who stand to make a killing off the insurance if it's not made ("Springtime for Hitler" it's not), but they decide to take one last chance and hire a notorious madame who just published her tell-all book as their fifth lead. The film's director can't handle all this stress, but when the murderer starts targeting him too, he's reaching his breaking point. Will he be able to take enough Alka Seltzer and JD cocktails to keep himself sane?

This is really fun. A USA Up All Nite style classic, complete with tons of boob shots that would've led to a lot of awkward edits in the cable TV version. Ray does a great job of handling the spoof aspect in a way that doesn't become too gimmicky, which is hard with this kind of movie. In a way it kind of feels like a Godard French New Wave film, in that it was a comedic commentary on the D industry the way Godard's films were a commentary on the then mainstream Hollywood industry-- the main difference being, where Godard would've had Jean-Pierre Leaud reading a socialist diatribe, Ray had one of his female stars showing her tits. This is definitely what you come to a 90s sex romp for, and Ray delivers.

With someone like Fred Olen Ray, who has such a prodigious directing bio, there are bound to be some misses along the way, and it's possible because he needs to pump out so many over a short period of time, more of them end up misses to him than he'd like because he doesn't get the time or the resources to make it the way he wants. It's good then when we get something like this, or Dinosaur Island, where we can showcase one of his hits, and what's funny about this one is that, in spoofing the D movie industry, he gives us an idea of how hard it is for him to make the movie he wants; but he does it in a way that's still funny and entertaining, and not whining, which is great for us in the audience. When you think of that great USA Up All Nite aesthetic, no one does it like Ray, and this film is a great example of that.

After Tom Sizemore's pouring beer on his cereal in Point Break, this scene of the director mixing his Alka Seltzer with Jack Daniels is the all-time best degenerate alcoholic food moment in movie history. Once I saw it, I knew I couldn't not talk about it. I think when he actually drank it it was like cream soda or something, but still, the effect was there. In my last post for Wicked, you may remember I mentioned a high school science teacher who was fired for giving another class non-alcoholic champagne. Here's another great story about him. One day that year the weatherman predicted a huge snow storm, and our teacher apparently banked on that happening and drank the lights out the night before. Of course, even if this is the southern tip of Maine we're talking about, it's still Maine, and it still needs to be a massive snow storm to get school called, and that storm wasn't enough. So he came into class with a hangover, and his lesson for the day was to show us how Alka Seltzer worked. I'm not kidding.

There are plenty of other people in this. The great Edy Williams plays the madame, and she seems to just go with all of it, whether she's changing in the back of a car, or telling the director she has a thing for men covered in garbage. Speaking of the director, he's played by Oliver Darrow, and he hasn't been in much else. That's too bad, because he was really funny here. Fred Olen Ray mainstay Jay Richardson is in this as the overbearing obnoxious actor who only cares about his career. I think he's given license to be as goofy as he wants here, and he definitely wants. B horror and sci-fi great Brinke Stevens plays the costume girl and Richardson's woman. She has almost 150 credits on imdb, of which almost all are DTV, and this is the first film of hers we've ever done, after well over 900 posts. I have no idea how that happened, but it did. Finally, Jefferey Culver played the producer. I couldn't figure out who he looked like. There were definitely some heavy notes of Jerry Orbach, a hint of the guy who played Bookman on Seinfeld, perhaps a dash of any former Murder She Wrote guest, and a blend of both Van Dyke brothers.

One thing you gotta love about watching any film is the director cameo, and Ray has two in this, one here as a guy robbing a liquor store, and later as a member of the crew tossing out scenes from the script-- literally throwing the pages out. This one here as the liquor store robber looked like it was almost entirely improvised, or at the very least, not rehearsed. I would've given you a shot of Ray without the bandanna over his face, but by the time he pulls it down, a topless Edy Williams shows up, and we can't show that if we want to keep oue blog without one of those parental warnings on it.

But hey, the movie's on Instant, so you can go there and see all the boobs you want. Beyond the boobs, this is also a pretty funny and entertaining movie. Fred Olen Ray delivers with a USA Up All Nite style classic, and it's well worth checking out.

Thursday, October 3, 2013

When I mentioned the DTVC to my girlfriend, she suggested I check this one out. I was instantly intrigued by the idea of doing a Julia Stiles flick, plus it has DTVC favorite Michael Parks as the detective. I recognized a couple other names too, in particular Patrick Muldoon. Often that's all I need anyway to get something on the blog, but it didn't hurt that she was requesting it-- yes, I guess that's the key to getting me to review your request, you have to be my girlfriend. Sorry she beat you to it.

Wicked is about a family living in a gated community in California. The oldest daughter, Julia Stiles, doesn't get along with the mother, and has a thing for the father. This works out for her when the mother is murdered. While detective Michael Parks is looking for the culprit, Stiles is busy filling her dearly departed mother's shoes, with the hopes of becoming her father's new wife. This isn't exactly working out for either the father or her younger sister, and when he brings a new wife home, tensions rise. What will Stiles do to get the family life back that she wants?

This is definitely a fun one in the vein of the Lifetime Original. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's bad, whether it's the wannabe Hitchcockian direction that feels more TV movie thriller, or the story that devolves into something unrecognizable by the end, or just the sheer silliness of seeing Julia Stiles as a young girl trying to be her mom; but it's fun too. Also, Stiles brings another element to the proceedings, because she is so good. She turns the silly craziness of her character into an almost chilling deviousness, often just with the look on her face, so one can see in this film that she was going somewhere. The rest of the cast, a mix of greats like Michael Parks and soap/Lifetime mainstays like Muldoon and William R. Moses, who played the dad, make this a great trash time waster, and sometimes that's all you need from a movie like this.

Julia Stiles is definitely the driving force of this film, and you can tell that, even then, she was a cut above everyone else other than maybe Parks. I don't know if this is one she puts on the top of her CV, especially when you look at her imdb bio and see that a year later 10 Things I Hate About You blew up, followed by Save the Last Dance a couple years after that. She's sort of fallen out of big Hollywood lead parts now, I think because they didn't know what to do with her once she couldn't play teens anymore; but to see her in a DTV Lifetime flick before she became big is a lot of fun. The novelty is definitely worth it.

One of the failures of the writing in this film was the way they utilized Michael Parks's detective. He was as good as you'd expect, and he comes across early on as that gumshoe who's going to figure this thing out just when the culprits think they're going to get away with it. This never really happened though, and in fact, he acts against character at the end, giving the film an unresolved quality that felt like a cop out. The thing that makes these Noir-ish suspense yarns is the detective, and when you have a guy like Parks, why not lean on him? Also, when you have an agent in your story like the detective, it's like you have an easy element who can resolve the story for you, and to not use that agent properly gives the film an inorganic quality that makes the whole thing not work. Too bad, but still, for fans of Michael Parks, he's a lot of fun.

Among the other stars, the one that we've seen on here before is Patrick Muldoon, who you may remember getting his ass kicked by Richard Norton in Rage and Honor II. He plays the derelict neighbor that's shagging the wife before she's offed, making him Parks's prime suspect. One of my favorites was William R. Moses, who played the dad, and who is a Lifetime Movie mainstay and does tons of TV work too. It was so weird hearing him swear, and I wonder if he was excited to be able to do that too, like "fuck TV man!" The mom was played by Chelsea Field, who played Teela in Masters of the Universe, but will be better known to most of you as the Western Airlines flight attendant whom Schwarzenegger tells "don't disturb my friend, he's dead tired" in Commando. Nothing as cool as that for her here, though she was a great character and it was too bad she was killed off so soon. Finally, the younger sister was played by Vanessa Zima, who I remembered from Ulee's Gold. Her last name is great too, reminding me of that alcoholic drink with the same name from the 90s. Our freshman science teacher asked us if we'd tried it before, and we were like "dude, we're 14!" Surprise surprise, he was fired at the end of the year for giving kids in another class non-alcoholic champagne, which I guess still has alcohol in it.

Part of the tension of this film is supposed to come with us, the audience, seeing Stiles as a young girl making moves on her father. Now, the father thing was definitely an issue, but the age wasn't, because she and I are roughly the same age. I mean, her outfits and whatnot are exactly what girls in my school wore, so I couldn't help transporting myself back to 1998 with them, and by doing that, making myself 19 again. Where the film did make its money in this respect though came in her interactions with Patrick Muldoon, those definitely made me feel uncomfortable. It's one of the odd things about movies though, the audience perception has a lot to do with how it comes off, and me not being able to divorce the fact that Stiles is my age from who her character was affected how I perceived the film.

Okay, let's wrap this up. As far as I know, this is only available on used DVD or VHS. I know I got it used on DVD, and it was really cheap. I'm not sure you should go out of your way to track it down, but if you see it in a bargain bin for a buck or two, it's worth it. As far as my girlfriend's knack for picking DTVC films: she's one for one right now, so we'll see if she retires one for one, or makes some future requests.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

This is one that our friends across the pond had the jump on us on by about two months before we got it here, and for me, having seen some of Christian Slater's other DTV work and enjoyed it, I was excited to see what it was all about. The problem was, after it was released, it was stuck in Long Wait limbo in my DVD queue. Finally we got it, so let's see if it was worth the wait. Also, our buddy Fred, The Ex-Ninja looked at this one, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Stranded is about a moon base that does some kind of mechanized mining operation supervised by a crew of four people. When the base is bombarded by a meteor shower, vital life support systems are damaged, and the crew is forced to wait while a rescue shuttle may or may not arrive. At the same time, a spore has been discovered on one of the rocks. I can't imagine that spore would be trouble at all though...

This isn't horrible by any stretch. It's well shot, well acted, the sets looked nice, etc. The thing I'm left with though is "and what?" We've seen this movie done so many times, and this one doesn't really add anything unique. Is that the worst thing ever? I guess kind of? I don't know. I think on some levels it wanted to be that combination of Solaris (the Tarkovsky version, of course) and Alien or The Thing, but it never quite got there for me. It's the kind of movie that if it ends up on Instant, or cable, or what have you, it's a fun way to kill 90 minutes, but I don't know if beyond Christian Slater it's anything you need to go out of your way for.

Slater is solid here again. It's an odd part though, because he's the lead, but he's not always the focal point of the film until the end. Other characters are affected by the spore, and we get their experience more, while Slater pops in and out to check up on things. It's an odd construct when you think about: a film in a small environment with only four characters, and somehow we lose one for periods of it, and that one is the film's main star. But Slater delivers that same smooth, consistent, almost effortless performance we've come to expect, and even with a film like this that would otherwise have been a skip for me, he elevates it to something else and makes it watchable and review-worthy. Can't wait to see what he does next.

This movie was directed by Roger Christian. If you don't know, he won an Oscar for his set decoration along with three other people for Star Wars, and was also nominated for the Oscar in the same category with three other people for Alien. On the other hand, he won a Razzie as director of Battlefield Earth. Ouch, though I don't really remember Battlefield Earth being poorly directed per se; but like in football where the quarterback gets all the glory in the win and the blame in a loss, the director has to wear it if his film is Battlefield Earth, fairly or unfairly. This is much better of course, and while that isn't saying much, I imagine, especially when working with a small budget, that it's hard to pull off the film you want, and I think he put together a solid effort here, one that proves that Razzie was a blip in his career, not indicative of his overall work.

After Slater, I really liked Brendan Fehr as the base's doctor. Really cool, and definitely made up for the times when Slater wasn't on-screen. According to imdb he seems to do a lot of TV work, but hopefully we'll see him in more DTV flicks, maybe opposite Slater, because they were good together. Then we had Amy Matysio as the crew member who first brings the spore on board. We've seen her a couple times on here before, recently in the Kim Coates flick Ferocious, and in another Slater film, Dolan's Cadillac. This was by far the biggest part we've seen her in though, and she wasn't bad. Finally, we had Michael Therriault as the base engineer. This is the first thing I've seen him in, and he was pretty good too, but I can't get too much into either his or Matysio's parts because I'll give away too much of the movie.

I had one major problem with this movie right from the start though, and while I suspended belief to some degree to get into it, it still affected how believable it was for me. If we're making bases on the moon, why are we not making them more durable? We know the moon has essentially no atmosphere, so rocks from space are going to impact what's there, unlike here where only the big ones hit and the rest are burnt up in our atmosphere before they hit. So you'd think they'd plan better for something like the catastrophe that befell them at the beginning. I understand that that would mean we'd have no movie, but if the movie hinges on something so unreasonable, isn't better to go back to the drawing board.

You can get this on the usual DVD suspects, Netflix, RedBox, etc. As I said above, while this isn't horrible, I'm not sure it's remarkable enough either to go too far out of your way for it. Again, you've seen this before, and it's really not bringing anything new to the table. A solid cable or Instant time waster, so if it ends up on either of those outlets and you come across it, it might not be too bad.